In review: Yspahan

Josh and I played a handful of games the other night (3 in 2 hours!). By far, the star that night was Yspahan. In subsequent days, I became quite enamored with the game, and got to play it again at a games night over at Chris and George's (friends we met through Josh and Megan). Then, I was able to borrow it and bring it home to play with the missus. Jill said, "I like it. Let's get it." Magic words, those. I haven't picked it up yet, but soon it will be mine...

Yspahan has a thin theme of merchants in a city (Yspahan) during the heyday of the Persian empire. You can place goods in shops around town, in an attempt to control blocks of shops, or you can try to get your goods onto the caravan that is bringing goods to Yspahan. The game has 21 turns (days), divided into three weeks

Yspahan is divided into 4 neighborhoods (see image below). Within each neighborhood, there are groups of shops (each group is called a souk) organized by color. If you place a good into any souk, no one else may place in any other shop in that souk. But you may not place in any other shop in that neighborhood until you have claimed the entire souk. The little white pawn is called the supervisor, and you may move it on your turn. If it lands in front of a shop with a good in it, that good is moved onto the caravan.

The setup, with the action board to the left and the caravan to the right.


If you move one of your own goods out to the caravan, it immediately scores. The entire caravan scores when it is full, or at the end of the week. Thus, you can count on your goods in the caravan scoring at least twice. The entire city scores at the end of the week, as well, and is then cleared of goods. Only souks that have been completed are scored, so one tactic is to use the supervisor to kick out an opponent's good from a lucrative souk to the caravan.

That is the basic plot and execution of actions in the game. The real fun is in the die rolling/action selection mechanism. Each turn, the start player will roll 9 dice, and then place them on the action board from lowest to highest. In the above image, I rolled 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 6, 6. So, the 1 goes in the lowest position, then the 2's, and so on. Since I didn't roll any 4's, the 5's occupy the fourth highest spot. The rule is that the highest number rolled always goes in the top spot, so there will always be at least one die there and in the lowest space (unless all numbers are identical). The result of this is that the 4th and 5th positions are less likely to have any dice.

Beginning with the start player, everyone chooses a row of dice and executes an action. If you want to place goods, you select one of the four middle rows and place as many goods as there are dice in that space. These rows have icons that refer to the four neighborhoods, so you can see that some of the neighborhoods are less likely to have any dice. If you want to move the supervisor, you choose any row of dice and move the supervisor exactly the number of spaces as the number rolled. If you want to take a card (very powerful, often), you choose a row of dice and take one card. The highest and lowest rows on the action board, respectively, give you gold or camels, which are used as currency in the game. After everyone has taken an action, the start player changes and a new day begins.

This game moves very quickly, and it's a lot of fun. I like the seven days between scoring rounds, as it gives you a chance to position yourself to execute multiple scoring strategies. This game is all about scoring points as you go (and taking them away from your competition). In that, it reminds me of El Grande. Ystari, the same small company/development group that produced Caylus, has seriously impressed me with this one. I hope that it holds its charm after several plays, since the cards are really the only variable element to the game.

I give it an 8 right out of the gate as a fast-playing game with decent depth of decisions and a dash of random fun thrown in with the dice mechanism. I bumped it to a 9 because it's easy to teach and seems to have pretty wide appeal, making it way more likely to get played at my house.